Actually, his business model includes "placement fees" to industry. He would identify students with high scores and/or creative solutions, and offer to introduce his top students to industry for the standard placement fee a personnel would normally charge. In my mind, that is at least as good, if not better, than what your prof will do. This model is a bit better than the off chance your prof may know someone somewhere that may be hiring 1 student, possibly.

The business case here is that it is expensive (time-wise) to develop content for 100 students, but becomes much cheaper to do so for 200,000. There is a whole industry built on updating learning material every year. Sure, we learn more about how to effectively teach all the time, but neither our knowledge of the universe (at least the sub-set of that knowledge that we need to teach the average student) nor our knowledge of how to teach better grows so fast as to require a complete re-write of the curriculum each year. There is a lot of fat in the system that can be done away with. This is an attempt to do just that. Maybe we can't effectively teach without face-to-face contact. Maybe we can use that face-to-face contact better. The lines and limits are worth exploring, especially since the cost of keeping the status quo in place is to place effective education out of the reach of most of the worlds population.

You don't understand sales. If I'm selling games and my competitor down the road is limiting stock in order to make a little more money next week, guess what? I'll stock more games and steal his sales.

What you're talking about is collusion between stores. First, it's illegal. Second, even if it happened anyway, it's impossible to get that sort of agreement going between such a large number of stores. Collusion is easy when there's only 3 stores and the managers all play golf each Wednesday morning.

Not so easy when every Joe Soap is a competitor not in on the little secret.

Sorry to burst your little conspiracy bubble. I know how self-important such cynicism makes us feel.

I'm interested in this myself. I see that most people respond to the example given, and not the question. Let's try to suggest some solutions without second guessing the application of which we have a limited view. My interest flows from the fact that Android running on my phone does not support wireless hotspot roaming. I have 3 hotspots in my home, but none of them on their own covers the whole house. So during the day I will have my phone on the wireless, but then at night I will lose connectivity while the phone is in the bedroom, or vice versa. I've adjusted the wireless power of the hotspots so that the phone loses connectivity and then searches for another hotspot, which works for the two locations listed, but it also means I have a ton of deadspots in-between. I'd like to solve the issue from the router side, by measuring the signal strength to the phone at some interval, and forcing a reconnect when it's closer to another hotspot. I know this solution means any current data connections will be severed when I transition, and I know that the issue may be bypassed by getting a stronger antenna. I'm doing this as a hobby / professional interest, so no cheating allowed. ;-) Any ideas welcome.

I only intended to indicate that just because it feels good doesn't mean it's true. I support anything which allows us to consider deeper questions or opens our mind to new ideas. I very much include religious texts in this, by the way, as long as you don't drink the cool-aid. LSD came to mind because I'm debating one of my theist (I should rather say "spiritualist") friends, who experienced an out-of-body moment during an LSD trip which has now convinced him of the existence of the supernatural, and by a magical leap also the general truth of the bible. Perhaps I'll take your advice and investigate LSD more fully... ;-) For academic purposes, of course.

Mod parent up! +1

I agree with you, these two things are not mutually exclusive. But you're missing the point. Most people believe in god b/c the concept "appears" to answer questions we don't have answers to. As science answers each question in turn, religion is giving ground and the foundation (raison d'etre) for faith is being eroded.

This is what Evolution is. An answer to a MAJOR question that we previously believed necessitated the existence of a god. It doesn't refute god, it just removes one of the reasons for believing in him.

Sure, there are still many things we don't know. And religion is still pretending to explain them, or at least imply (dishonestly) that unless science can answer absolutely everything or have all answers perfectly correct to whatever arbitrary resolution the faithful requires, then by implication religion must have a point.

An explanation is describing something we don't understand in terms we do. In this way we can understand the new concept or phenomenon well enough to be able to predict it's impact on our lives. Saying "god did it", or "god works in mysterious ways" is not an explanation. It's an assertion completely devoid of rational arguments or evidence.

Your "evidence" that something random happened in your life that you see the hand of god in is called selection bias. Look it up. We understand human psychology well enough to be able to explain (and refute it as a basis for understanding or proof) it well enough to discount it. You believe because you were indoctrinated as a child the same way every other religion's adherents were. Or you simply like the way it makes you feel.

Try taking LSD, it's even better, but it doesn't make your life any better or more meaningful.

I have 3 Netgear WNDR-3700's in my home. Backbone is on 5GHz, providing 2.4GHz hotspots. Running DDWRT and lovin' it. No issues, blazing fast. Getting 270 to 300 kbps on average.

I had the same idea, but from my time playing with them at university, I remember that they have a very limited number of write cycles. You can reprogram them enough to do your development and bugfixes, but you can't reprogram them every time you run a different type of application. Well, that is now. I suppose if someone can prove that it will make consumers happy that the engineers can find a way to increase the write limit.

Then how do you explain google chat? and google voice?

The way you state that makes it sound like some nefarious immoral thing to support the mod community. And I'll challenge just about every point you make. Google gets NO income from Android? Why do they bother, then? And I'll point you to the PS3 as an example of companies changing the functionality of a device even after release. You're assuming that the manufacturers of the hardware care more about jailbreaking than do the developers of the OS, while exactly the opposite is true. Jailbreaking allows piracy, which decreases the incentive for freelance developers to develop apps for the OS. Less apps means less public interest in the platform, which means handset manufacturers will simply pick another OS for their hardware. Only the OS guys lose out, HTC wouldn't care at all. --- Perversely, by supporting the mod community, Google has created MORE interest in Android, not less. That's the way I like to see businesses making money. Find a way to make cash by giving consumers what they want, not by locking them in.

None of that is neccesary. For a while I dispaired that Google was going the way of Apple, but they have since worked with Cyanogen and released all the apps as a seperate installable .zip file. The only difference is that you need to flash two zips instead of 1. A company working WITH a mod guy to solve his problems and let him do his thing!? What is the world coming to. I've tried a million different ROMs, and Cyanogen is teh BOM in my opinion. I've still got an old Magic (Sapphire, G2, or whatever they keep naming the same device), and every time a new version of Cyanogen comes out it's like getting a new handset. It's awesome. ;-)

Alkaline batteries, like Hydrogen Fuel Cells, are a storage medium for energy. It is not an energy source, and is not in any way related to this discussion.

It's a common misconception that foreign owners of local business exploit the country by keeping all the profits. I'm not a mining expert, but even if my figures are wildly off base I think I can still make my point. Lets say that the profit of a mining house in Afghanistan is 10%, that means that 90% of all wealth created by the company remains in the country. This is in the form of bought goods and services, labor, and taxes. So while it is true that all the "profit" leaves the country in a 100% owned American company, most of the wealth stays in the country. No matter how you look at it, extracted minerals will be VASTLY better for Afghanistan than leaving it in the ground. And if they need foreign help to get going so be it. The way foreign companies have shifted this balance of benefit unfairly in the past is by a) buying all the goods and services (and a lot of the labor) from their own country b) paying the locals very low wages c) selling the product back to themselves at very low prices This means that very little money is spent INSIDE the country, and very little profit (if any) is made by the sale of product, so no taxes goes to the government. This is pure exploitation and most of the created wealth leaves the country. Assuming someone learn't from history and negotiates an ethical agreement, this is good for the country. If the government accepts a bribe and allows the above to happen, its a different matter. American wealth and living standards these days depend on this sort of "shrewd" business negotiations. Where do your responsibility to your stockholders end and your responsibility to foreign citizens begin? What would you be willing to give up in terms of living standards to have the warm fuzzy feeling that someone somewhere in Afghanistan (that probably hates your guts) has something to eat and somewhere to sleep tonight? It's easy to blame big business, but I've found that the overwhelming majority of people would be even less ethical in their own dealings, and would never accent to the flip side of the coin. "BAN DIRTY OIL COMPANIES!" (but don't DARE raise the cost of fuel for my Hummer!) K

It wasn't a "normal" month. ;-) FREEDOM!!! It was nice to experience it for a month. Now it's back to normal. It's not really relevant to compare SA usage to what this topic line is, as we ALWAYS have to consider the additional cost of download, whereas the main poster is trying to establish "typical" use without these constraints. I don't think there really is such a thing. The variance would be too big for you to base your usage on what others are doing, even in the same country or industry. If you like downloading movies on usenet or torrents, your usage would be orders of magnitude larger than those who only browse and download the occasional driver. Ditto for Linux users who always like to be up to date (medium usage) or those who always like to try out the latest distros and compare it to their standard Ubuntu box (heavy users). So best is to measure yourself over a "normal" month, and see what you get. My measurement always gets skewed by normal network traffic between the PCs in my home. You could probably seperate BW based on subnet destinations, but I've never been that interested. I try to manage my monthly bill, but other than that... Cheers! K